Domain of the Bored

Spam comments blocked by Negative Turing Test in April 2008:

44,573

Average number of spam comments blocked by Negative Turing Test in per month from the start of November 2007 through the end of March 2008:

6,529^.8

Total number of spam comments blocked by Negative Turing Test in the same time period:

32,649

Note that this is only on my blog, not any other blogs that use NTT.

Upon inspiration by a comment, I've just updated my rant from a couple years ago, “Photoshop sucks”, to include a list of alternatives. Topping the list, of course, is Acorn; also included are Core Image Fun House, Pixelmator, DrawIt, and Iris.

I'm very glad that there are now solutions to the problem that is Photoshop. I dislike bitching about something without a solution to offer; now I have six to offer, so that rant is now complete.

If any of you were wondering how to share my entire ASL series of posts with people (e.g., via del.icio.us), I've added a list of links to the posts to my announcement post from earlier.

It doesn't actually have any links yet, of course. I'll be adding the links as I publish the posts.

In Mac OS X 10.4, Apple introduced a new logging system called Apple System Logger. ASL is comprised of three parts:

• A logging API with all the capabilities of syslog(3) and more. You may think of it as the Quartz or QuickDraw GX to syslog's QuickDraw.
• syslogd. Apple's implementation is modular; on Mac OS X, it includes (among many other modules, well-documented in Mac OS X Internals) an input for communication with ASL clients (i.e., your app) and an output that reads and writes the ASL database. (Minor note: Tiger uses a log file instead of a database.)
• A front-end command-line tool, confusingly named syslog(1), even though it uses the ASL API rather than syslog(3).

The implementations of all three parts are open-source. The logging API is part of Libc, and syslogd and the command-line utility are the two halves of the syslog project. (In case you're wondering: Those exist in Tiger's Libc and Tiger's syslog as well.)

The API is declared with plenty of comments in /usr/include/asl.h, and documented* in a manpage, though neither of those is exactly an exhaustive treatment of the API.

So, over the next Beatles' week, I'm going to run a series of posts about ASL. I plan to give you:

• A tutorial on using the ASL API
• Bits of code and suggestions that go beyond the documentation
• Three of my test apps, which are general enough that someone should be able to use them for purposes other than simply pounding on the API

Stay tuned!

(Also, this is post #601 in WordPress' DB. Woo!)

---

* While I was at Apple, I told Blake that it's undocumented, but after I got home, I found the manpage. It exists in both Tiger and Leopard. Oops. Sorry, Blake. ↶

Spam comments blocked by Negative Turing Test in October 2007 (and November 1–3):

20,221

I've finished fixing number 12. Now, when you forget to answer the Turing test, your response will reappear in the comment form when the post loads.

For those of you who run Negative Turing Test on your own blag: WordPress has a bug as of both 2.1 and 2.3. Normally, when you submit a comment, WordPress sets three cookies that it uses to automatically fill in the Name, Email, and URL fields on the commenter's future visits. When a plug-in like NTT deletes the comment, WordPress fails to notice and empties out the cookies. The result is that, when NTT deletes the comment, the name, email, and URL fields come back empty. (This is true with or without the fix for number 12.)

There's nothing NTT can do about that—it's a WordPress bug that I discovered in testing the fix for number 12. I isolated the problem and have already fixed it here, and I'll soon submit a patch to the WordPress developers so that you can all have this fix as well. Until they accept it, here's the patch for WordPress 2.3.

Spam comments blocked by Negative Turing Test in September 2007 (excluding September 1–3):

6,826

On the general options pane, there is a field labeled “Tagline”:

The value shown in that field is WRONG WRONG WRONG!

You see, that's actually supposed to be HTML—or at least, such is the implication of the Atom template's use of bloginfo_rss to get the description. The difference between {get_,}bloginfo_rss and {get_,}bloginfo is that the _rss versions call strip_tags to take out any HTML and escape any non-HTML characters, such as &.

That wouldn't be so bad if strip_tags worked properly, but it doesn't—not on this host, at least. It leaves the second & in the above example unescaped. (“OK, I escaped that one. It must be the only one. I'm off to Subway!”)

As if that wasn't bad enough, WordPress doesn't escape the tagline field's value when putting it back into the field the next time you load up the Options pane. (It does if it's plain text, but not if it's HTML. Go figure.) So if you click “Update Options” again, your HTML goes bye-bye. You need to remember to re-escape it every time you save the General Options.

(Given that, maybe it's not supposed to be HTML after all, and the use of bloginfo_rss in the Atom 0.3 template is a bug.)

Want to know how I found this out? Because the RSS reader in Safari 2 (I don't use 3) was critically failing on the Atom feed. It was slurring posts together once it saw that an ampersand was not escaped.

Relevant versions:

• WordPress 2.1.3
• PHP 5.1.4 or so (I have no idea what version is actually running the blogs)
• Safari 2.0.4/419.3

Sorry I'm late with this. Here we go.

Spam comments blocked by Negative Turing Test in August 2007 (and September 1–3):

17,837

Looks like last month's lull was temporary. They're ramping back up.

Spam comments blocked by Negative Turing Test in July 2007:

9,721

I wonder what caused the drop. (Not that I'm complaining!)

Spam comments blocked by Negative Turing Test in June 2007:

38,502

This is a partial list until Friday night, but it's worth posting now because of all the people I met at the WWDC Bash.

Where possible, I've also listed their IRC nickname.

Adium-related people I met at WWDC

• Colin Barrett (cbarrett)
• Brian Ganninger (whom I'd previously met at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit) (bgannin)
• Patrick Gibson (patch writer, not developer) (pblair)
• Elliott Harris (eharris)
• David Smith (Catfish_Man)

Other people I met at WWDC

• Karl Adam (PantherMachina)
• Dave Batton [Added Friday, though I met him before the Keynote]
• Ken Ferry (kongtomorrow)
• Andy Kim [Added Friday]
• Paul Kim (mr_noodle) [Added Friday, though I met him after the Keynote]
• Devin Lane (DevG5)
• Gus Mueller (ccgus) [Added Friday]
• Scott Stevenson [Added Friday; I'd met him previously at CocoaHeads]
• Many Adium fans (thanks for your kind words, everyone!)

Bloggers I met at the WWDC Bash

• Kevin Ballard (Eridius)
• Blake C. (who is apparently a big fan—woot!)
• Steven Frank
• Daniel Jalkut (dcj)
• Jonathan Rentzsch (rentzsch)
• Cabel Sasser
• Jonathan Wight (schwa)
• Dan Wood

Bloggers I met at CocoaHeads

• Scott Stevenson

The audience was SRO, so David and I (along with Devin and Michael Gorbach) just went off to The Studio and hacked code. After the meeting, I went up to Scott, and we shook hands and that was it. My guess is that it was a busy night and he wanted sleep.

People I've seen at WWDC, but did not talk to

• Aaron Hillegass
• Uli Kusterer
• Wil Shipley
• Brent Simmons
• Quinn
• George Warner

People I saw at the WWDC Bash, but did not talk to

• john calhoun
• Martin Ott (I think he saw my Adium shirt and said “look, Adium!”, but it could just be wishful hearing, considering Ozomatli was blaring at the time)
• Some other people I'm totally blanking on

Since I'm at WWDC, all the bugs I'm filing this week are Leopard bugs. That means that their contents are under NDA, so I can't post them on the web. Thus, there will be no ABF this week. ABF will return next week with at least two bugs! And yes, they will both be Tiger bugs.

I've reset the NTT counter at 26,445 spams. Once again, next month will bring another count of spams-per-month. I think I'll do this every month and establish a trend. Maybe find some free graphing software and plot a graph with the counts.

I just moved the blog feed over to FeedBurner. It's a permanent redirect, so your reader should handle the move for you, but it doesn't update in Vienna. Please make the change yourself (and if you're using some other reader, make sure it updated)—otherwise, you're just bouncing off my server every half hour for no reason. Thanks.

Simone Manganelli, on his blog Technological Supernova, which I apparently link to a lot (just kidding!), presents a breakdown of pages that link to his blog. So, always one to jump on a fun-looking bandwagon, here's my implementation of the same thing…

(more...)

As of r58, you can now tell Negative Turing Test to delete spam comments instead of marking them as spam. (This is in the NTT Options pane.)

I just turned this on here. It worked fine on the test post; we'll see how well it works in real usage.

Oh, and in case you ever need to delete a comment from a WP plug-in: Use wp_set_comment_status. I thought for so long that WP had no programmatic way to delete comments—now I know that it does.

One of Negative Turing Test's most recent features is a counter of how many spams it eats. I added this feature last month, and made a note to reveal today what it got up to.

The number of spams blocked by NTT from 2007-02-12 to 2007-03-12 is:

6,220

I should probably get around to making it delete those…

A different brand of weird this time:

Make up your mind?